Another foreigner is featured on Croatian national television on January 21, 2018, featuring a unique project to preserve the memories of Croatian village life and tradition.
After a few years of living on the island of Hvar, I thought I knew exactly how many foreigners were living on the island full-time. And then a Norwegian would appear from a village in eastern Hvar, then an American from some pad outside an inland village, an Austrian who lived in an otherwise abandoned village. The longer I lived there, the less I was surprised to come across a foreigner who had shared the same island as me for over a decade.
Moving to a national stage with TCN, there are of course many, many more foreigners living in Croatia full-time (just exactly how many are registered, you can learn here). With our series on Croatia’s foreign entrepreneurs, the incoming emails have been coming thick and fast, and there are some truly fascinating foreigners doing some amazing things. The one story which arguably had the biggest impact was our feature on Dutchman Rene, whose Proplan NGO is doing vital work visiting the old, forgotten and abandoned elderly people in rural Croatia.
Meeting Rene has opened up a new level of foreigner engagement, much of it in rural Croatia, and we should have possibly the coolest foreigner feature yet coming soon. But while you are waiting for that one, here is another remarkable story of an Englishman who ended up moving to Croatia, having seen an exhibition of Croatian cultural artifacts destroyed in the Homeland War back in 1992. Having moved to a small village near Duga Resa, Andrew Norris then realised that village life was changing and old traditions were dying out, so he has dedicated a considerable amount of effort to document all aspects of life in the village of Bukovlje over a period of years.
His story and work were featured on Croatian television a few days ago (it is mostly in English, with Croatian subtitles), and I encourage you to watch.
A quick search on YouTube reveals a true treasure trove of material about this rapidly changing way of life. Check out the trailer above as one example.
To visit Andrew’s YouTube channel, click here.
